2004-05-14

Although today I�ve got to finish a million projects and keep up sundry e-mail correspondences, I�m taking the time, for you, to make up for my recent machine-gun terseness with a nice, long, luxurious hot-tub-soak of a post. Life these days is full of weirdness, and all I have to do is write it down. Fate is doing my job for me.

First, I have to admit to falling victim to irony�s most obvious sucker-punch: I�ve realized over the past two days that Montr�al really is industrial-strength cool and that I desperately need to spend WAY more time there. Pity I�m leaving the continent in three weeks. Montr�al! I hardly knew ye!

While there, I met a friend of a friend who had lived in London for a year. Conversation naturally turned UK-wards (ha ha, �turned� � anyone who knows me can attest that I haven�t talked about anything else for six months. My farewell party is liable to be more of a �shut the fuck up and leave already, you annoying bitch� party). �What did you do while you were over there?� I asked.

�Oh, worked in a pub,� he said.

�Actually,� I said, �I�ve got a standing offer to do the same. I met the landlord of the Old Queen�s Head in Islington, and he offered me a job should I ever move to London.�

�Yeah,� said my friend. �That�s who I worked for.�

He was so blas� about it I thought he was joking. It took about five minutes of witty back-and-forth (�You�re fucking shitting me!� �No, seriously, I�m not.� �Yeah you are. You�re shitting me.� �Really, I�m not.�) to establish that he was telling the truth. Of all the pubs in all of England�yeah. My brain is still reeling a little from that super-sized helping of coincidence.

Coincidence, part the second: another friend is flying into London exactly the same day I am. (My ticket was obscenely, unbelievably, mind-bogglingly cheap, the only stipulation being that I have to fly into Gatwick and take the train up to Manchester. Dude, for two hundred and eighty-nine dollars, I would gladly travel by camel.) Coincidence the third: I just found out this morning that a friend from Calgary, whom I haven�t seen in years, happens to be in Ottawa, and happens to be moving to England at the same time I am.

I choose to take these things as positive auguries. Or else evidence that I�m being secretly filmed in some sort of anthropological experiment. Either way, all roads lead to England.

Here�s some unrelated weirdness courtesy of my mom�s family: last night, the phone rang at around eleven PM. I�d just gotten home from the bus station and was tired and sunburned and cranky at the prospect of coming in to work this morning, and was in no mood for late-night shenanigans (eleven PM on a weeknight?? Don�t you know I�m eighty over here?).

I picked up the phone expecting some drunken suitor of my sister�s, and there was an officious-sounding male voice on the line. �Is this Robin Smith?�

�Uh, yes.�

�The daughter of Margaret Smith?�

Holy fuck. �Yes,� I said, a note of panic audibly creeping into my voice. The words �next of kin� flashed suddenly in my mind.

�Oh, hello,� said the voice. �This is your uncle Al.� I relaxed slightly, and downgraded the projected emergency from �dead mother� to �dead distant relative�: I hadn�t spoken to this uncle in upwards of ten years, and why else would you be phoning estranged extended family late at night in the middle of the week?

I�ll tell you why:

�I need to get in touch with your mother,� he said. Still, I am tense � in my head, I�ve got an aunt or cousin in the intensive care ward, and I�m bracing for the impact of this inevitable announcement.

�She and my dad have gone to Qu�bec City,� I said. �Is there a message I can get to her?�

�Oh, yes,� says Al. �We�re trying to plan a cruise for the family, and we need to know if she�d be interested in coming.�

Oh, well, a cruise. I can see why this information could not be conveyed through regular channels, or during daylight hours. Operation: Cruise must be implemented without delay!

�Uh�unfortunately, I don�t have the name of the hotel they�re staying at in Qu�bec,� I said. �But they�ll be back in town on the 20th, and if they get in touch with me before then, I�ll have my mom call you.�

This was not good enough. The Cruise Nazi travel agent waits for no man! �Will they be checking their e-mail?� my uncle asked.

�I don�t think so,� I said, my mind still in a sort of fug as to whether this conversation was really happening.

�Do you have an e-mail address? Can I send you the information?�

�Um. Sure. Do you have a pen?�

�Yes.�

My work e-mail address, being a government domain, is of course a long string of acronyms linked with randomly-inserted hyphens and dots. This led to a bad vaudevillian routine of mal-entendres as I tried to spell it out over a bad connection: �B as in �boy�?� �No, D as in �dog.�� �OK, so it�s H as in �Harry,� R as in �raisin,� D as in �dog,� C as in �cracker,� hyphen, D as in �dog��� �No, you need another C in there.� �Another B?� �No, C! Before the D.� �So there are two Cs?� �Yes.� �OK, so H as in �Harry,� R as in �raisin���

�And so on, for ten minutes. And then Al hung up. And such was the nature of our joyful reunion after such a long estrangement. It might help to explain that my mom�s family is Mennonite, but probably not. I�m pretty much at a loss.

And with that, I leave you for a weekend of packing, sorting, cleaning, and general incredulous gawping at the sheer amount of crap I�ve managed to accumulate in my personal area. The moral of the story is, don�t let cruise-planning sneak up on you.